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Iceing for Any Cake
Mrs. Upham.
Instead of beating the eggs to a stiff froth, as is generally the case, take four tablespoons of sugar to the egg, and stir thoroughly, then spread on cake ; will make a make a much harder iceing than beating it.
This is a two-ingredient royal icing of the plainest sort, and the note is really an argument about technique rather than a full recipe. It also relies on raw egg that never gets heated, which is the reason for the caution above.
- Why it cannot be made as writtenThe egg is beaten with sugar, spread on the cake, and eaten without ever reaching a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Sugar at this ratio is far too dilute to make the mixture inhospitable to bacteria, and the icing sits at room temperature for hours or days. Use a current royal icing recipe instead.
- Drying is not cookingAn air-dried royal icing crust feels firm but the interior stays moist, and drying does not reduce pathogens. The hardness Mrs. Upham is after is a sugar effect, not a sterilising one.
- "To the egg" is ambiguousPeriod icing directions often mean the white alone, and the reference to beating to a stiff froth points that way here, but the text never says so. No number of eggs is given either — the proportion is simply four tablespoons of sugar per egg.
- The sugar ratio is lowFour tablespoons is roughly 2 ounces, where a modern royal icing uses closer to 7 or 8 ounces of powdered sugar per white. That gap may be why the original is spread while soft rather than piped.
- Sugar meant something coarserHousehold "sugar" in the 1870s might still be loaf sugar pounded and sifted at home, and its fineness varied. Today's powdered sugar dissolves without beating.
- The point she is makingWhipping air into the white gives a light, matte, slightly chewy coating; stirring sugar in without aeration gives a dense layer that dries brittle. The observation is sound, and it is the only real content of the note.
- YieldOne white with four tablespoons of sugar covers roughly the top of a single 8-inch layer, thinly.
The Home Cook Book was assembled in Chicago in the 1870s from contributions by named local women, and the format shows here: a signed paragraph offering one cook's opinion rather than a tested formula, printed alongside other versions of the same thing. Icing of beaten egg white and sugar is royal icing, a name usually traced to its use on grand English cakes of the nineteenth century, an era before butter-and-powdered-sugar frostings became common, and it was valued precisely for setting hard enough to protect a cake and to carry piped decoration. Mrs. Upham's tip belongs to a whole genre of period kitchen argument over whether whites should be whipped, stirred, or worked with a spatula, questions that mattered a great deal when much of the work was done by hand.